Post navigation

Building The Future Now

It’s 2118, June 3.
My eyes see colors that never existed in my vocabulary before. The sheen and glow of ions coruscate off my metal and foam shell. I am immense. I feel very strange, but very normal. It is my first connection with the mother ship

Normally, I would ask the computer for the information. What word best describes THAT color? Isn’t it one quarter octave beyond red? Oh, what about that one? The fractional wavelength of sea green?

But I cannot, for I am one with the computer. Annoying to know while not knowing. In some reference bank, carefully cross indexed, lies the answer. But I cannot internally formulate the query that would unlock it. Sigh.

It’s a security feature – no unauthorized human in direct link can access anyone else’s files – or the main reference, either. Perhaps it is to discourage people from spending too much life in cyberspace.

I disconnect.

In short order, I re-acclimate myself to “meat bag of water” limitations.

In the control nexus of the mother ship I am supine upon a cyber couch. When under way, the go-captain would be plugged in, monitoring space-time with the artificial intelligence aiding him. The pilot would be also involved, but only with the navigation duties. The overall operational executive power is still the head man – the captain.

Our mega colony is riding upon the gravity waves of the Interplanetary Transport Network, slowly changing its orbit to a more prosperous one.

It seems odd to consider how the standards of life support have changed. In the recent past, there were hordes of parasites skimming from the laboring donors, who were entrapped into servility. Now, the equitable trade of labor and production has supplanted profit taking and other predations. It’s such a strange notion to expect MORE in trade than what one offered.

Isn’t it inequitable? Isn’t it a form of cheating? You expend so much labor and resources to produce and in return you want more in return – Baffling !

Today, one generates surplus – more than he can use for himself – and trades it with someone else for their surplus. No one is cheated. No one is skimmed. If you can’t generate surplus, you’re barely self sufficient. What hearty productive, creative dynamic person cannot generate surplus? All strive to be the most, the best, the admired if only for the good opinions of all one’s friends and associates.

Upon the great space vessels and habitats, crews work hard, play hard, live good and enjoy their frolics. There is a widely held satisfaction in working for the benefit of the seventh generation yet to come. For their benefit and continued prosperity do we dare, risk and enterprise.

And if one is injured or infirm, all charity is dependent upon prodigious production of surplus without which generosity would be impaired. But few are ever so completely dependent and helpless, when there are so many environments and levels of gravity. In the worst case of total paralysis, one can still “jack in” their cerebral cortex into the ship net, and accomplish useful tasks and avoid boredom.

In the mother ship all the necessities, comforts, and luxuries enjoyed or aspired to by an individual or group is available or can be constructed, via the fabricons and myrmidons. We have the resources of the whole solar system, endless power, and expansion space for millennia.